QuarkChain is a secure, permission-less, scalable, and decentralized blockchain. One of the goals of QuarkChain is to utilize sharding technology to deliver over 1 million transactions per second (tps). Essentially, QuarkChain markets itself as a peer-to-peer blockchain with a high capacity throughput to help deliver fast and secure decentralized applications. The team behind QuarkChain created this blockchain to resolve the issue of scalability that all the major blockchains are currently facing. The team feels that because of the urgency of this issue, the Bitcoin community simply cannot afford to wait until they all agree on a solution. Instead, they feel that by offering different solutions, such as the one inherent in QuarkChain, this compels the community to split via a hard fork and find the solution that works best. QuarkChain encourages increased decentralization through multiple cheap nodes that then create a cluster that works as a super-full node. This prevents the high expenses associated with super-full nodes when the tps gets high. In terms of protection, all transactions within QuarkChain get the protection of 50 percent of the network’s hash power. This makes a double-spending attack incredibly challenging, particularly when combined with QuarkChain’s decentralized nature. QuarkChain relies on a two-layer blockchain structure. Sharding blockchains known as shards are the first layer, while the second layer is a root blockchain that confirms the shards’ blocks.The major work on QuarkChain began in Q2 2017 with research into the problem of blockchain scalability. In Q4 of that year, the team drafted the whitepaper. In February 2018, it released the white paper and completed verification code 0.1. March 2018 saw the 0.1 versions of both the wallet and testnet. Now in Q2, the team is working on the testnet 1.0 and smart contract 0.1. In Q4 2018, the team will have the QuarkChain Core 1.0, along with the mainnet 1.0 and the SmartWallet 1.0. By Q2 2019, both the SmartWallet and QuarkChain Core will be in their 2.0 versions. QuarkChain is a decentralized blockchain network that aims to resolve the issues of scalability that plague existing networks by using sharding technology. In this way, QuarkChain can dramatically extend the usefulness of blockchain technology since many applications are limited by the scalability of existing blockchain networks. The project is still in progress, but QuarkChain has already made many positive steps and already began invite-based beta testing for the testnet, showing significant progress and potential. The main features of Quarkchain are: 1. Reshardable two-layered blockchain: Quarkchain consists of two layers of blockchains. We apply elastic sharding blockchains (shards) as the first layer, and a root blockchain as the second layer that confirms the blocks from the first layer. The second layer that confirms the blocks from the first layer. The second layer is flexible to be resharded as needed without changing the root layer. 2. Guaranteed security by market-driven collaborative mining: To ensure the security of all transactions, a game-theoretic framework is designed for incentives, where at least 50% of overall hash powers are allocated to the root chain to prevent double spending attack on any transactions. 3. Anti-centralized horizontal scalability: In any blockchain network with a high TPS, a super-full node can be extremely expensive, which encourages centralization. In contrast, QuarkChain allows multiple cheap nodes forming a cluster to replace a super-full node. 4. Efficient cross-shard transactions: Cross-shard transactions in QuarkChain can be issued at any time, and confirmed in minutes. The speed of cross-shard transactions increases linearly as the number of shards increases. 5. Simple account management: There is only one account needed for the entire blockchain (shards) in QuarkChain. All cryptocurrencies from different shards are stored in one smart wallet.
Electroneum has coined the phrase 'enablement currency' as it is going to enable a new 3 trillion dollar market (Price Waterhouse Coopers predicts this market to be as large as USD 3 trillion in their 2017 Global Fintech Report) by allowing over 350m smartphone users in the developing world to enter the digital market for the first time. With immediate benefits to the mobile operators in those regions, including meaningful transactional cost savings, there are operators who could take us to well over 100 million users and many more operators in negotiation. Our unique mobile miner puts a small amount of ETN into the hands of users every day, providing market liquidity and driving viral growth. With 2,341,445 million registered users, we have a faster viral growth than both Facebook and Twitter over the same time period. The Electroneum manage to raise 40 million dollars through ICO. Their Github release was November 1st. However, before the launch of the mobile app, they were hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The team had to shut down their servers and work over 26 hours straight to deal with the attack. Eventually, after some delay, ICO investors were distributed their coins and Electroneum continued working towards their goal of spreading ETN to the masses. Over 690 million ETN were transferring during the first 24 hours, requiring only 430 ETN in fees. Electroneum calls itself the first British based cryptocurrency. The team of 12, based in Kent, is led by Richard Ells, the co-founder of SiteWizard and Retortal.com. James Atkinson is the head of the Electroneum Development Team with over 10 years of experience in development. He’s leading the charge on the Electroneum App. Great respect is given to Dean Cole, the “member of the team with the least sleep… consuming giant quantities of caffeine.” He maintains and develops the servers required for mining and transacting in Electroneum. There are several gambling websites already accepting Bitcoin, but the problem is that it’s hard for most people to obtain it. The majority of online gambling takes place outside of America, where it’s especially hard to acquire Bitcoin. Most countries do not have access to Coinbase or Gemini and their local exchanges often have 7% fees or higher. Electroneum once again hopes to reduce friction and encouraging gambling sites to accept the currency. As mentioned previously, due to the ASIC resistant nature of the Electroneum mining algorithm, it’s still feasible to mine coins with just your CPU. You can complete a quick download and join a mining pool right away here. The average block reward is about 7000 ETN. Electroneum has also increased its palatability to the average consumer by capping the total number of coins at 21 billion, moving the decimal point two places to the right when compared to Bitcoin, which is capped at 21 million. Whereas a pizza in Bitcoin might cost 0.005 BTC, with Electroneum it would be a much more ‘real money’ figure. Richard Ells, founder of Electroneum and experienced tech entrepreneur, said: “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried buying any Bitcoin, but it’s really hard to do! I realized that what the world needs is a cryptocurrency that is genuinely easy to access and use. We’ve developed Electroneum with the ordinary mobile user in mind.”